My First Contest

I entered my first Contest and placed well! One of my photography instructors had been encouraging us to enter the TN Valley Fair Competition and I had a friend that pushed me into doing it as well. I don't know why I held back. I think I was really afraid of feeling that if I didn't win it would mean they really weren't very good. I waited until the very last day to enter. All in all, it ended up being a very positive experience. I learned how to follow the rules in sizing and mounting my photos - I had never mounted anything before.

It was very intimidating when I dropped them off at the Fair Grounds. I could not believe all the photos; there must have been a thousand of them! The girl in front of me - hers were very good! I decided I would be happy if just some of mine were even displayed or if just one might get an honorable mention or something.

We could enter up to eight and I so I did. Three won ribbons; a first, second and fourth places! I am thrilled. Here are my winners and the categories in which they won. I am so proud... not going to be fit to live with for awhile!

1st Place Black and White / Plant or Man Made Objects

2nd Place Color / Motion or Action

4th Place - Black and White / Architecture

Slow Shutter Speed for Flowing Water

Argghhh - I don't know how long it is going to take me to get this stuff into my head. Drove up to the mountains last Sunday with my son. We stopped to picnic at this little spot beside the road. Before we left, I thought I'd get a photo. The Joe Pye Weed was blooming beside this pretty little mountain stream and I love Joe Pye Weed because it is one of the few things blooming this late in the summer. It was a little overcast making the conditions right for a water shot here. I love photos making water look like it is flowing rather than frozen in action. You can't make these shots in bright sun light because you have to be able to slow the shutter speed down enough to make the water look all soft and yet not let the white caps get over exposed. When you slow the shutter speed down it lets more light into the camera therefore easy to over expose the shot.

I got out my tripod and framed the shot. I set my aperture as small as it would go. This would let in less light and I wanted to have a large depth of field anyway. I took the shot and it didn't work. The shutter speed was still too fast. I tried a couple more and then remembered I had to adjust the ISO. It had been on auto. Even then I couldn't get the shutter speed low enough. See the photo to the right. Yuck!

I get back in the car and my son asked if I got the shot I wanted. Noooo! I was doing something wrong, but what? 3 minutes down the road it hit me! I had been turning the ISO up instead of down. I had been thinking so much lately about speeding the shutter speed up in order to NOT take a blurry picture that when I WANTED a blurry picture, what did I do? I turned it up! In turning it up I was causing a faster shutter speed instead of the slower one I needed. I had taken the photo at F22 with an ISO of 1600 which made the shutter speed 1/30 - the slowest I could get it without over exposing the shot. While 1/30th of a second is slow it was not slow enough to get the nice fluffy water I was hoping for.


About a minute later I saw this other spot and pulled over and made the shot again this time cranking down my ISO instead of up. This was shot at F22 with an ISO of 100 at 1/6. This is much better. See how the water looks like it is flowing rather than frozen in place? This is more what your eye sees when looking at a mountain stream. With more shade it would have slowed the shutter speed down even more and been awesome.

Below is one I took a few months ago. It was shot at F22 with an ISO of 200 at 4 seconds. It is probably a bit too slow, but I love the effect and the feeling it gives. The spot where I took this was so shady there wasn't any sunlight being let in by the trees. This is what I wanted!

Focus in Landscape Shots

Here is something new I just learned... haven't used it myself yet. In a landscape shot I had been focusing out to infinity, but the buzz is that you should focus about 1/3 of the way from the foreground into the shot (would be at an imaginary line drawn across the bottom 1/3 of the photo). Hmmm.... the idea is so that the foreground will be in focus as well as the background scene. I am going to try it.

Customizing Your Camera Settings

Once I found out where to find controls on my camera, what they did and how to use them I discovered I had new question. Were the factory default settings the best settings? What did I need my function button to do, how much of an Ev step was best, did I need to adjust the picture mode settings? What settings had professional photographers who had used my camera determined made the best pictures and worked the smoothest. I discovered that they indeed chose to change many of the factory default settings in the Olympus 510. For example, by setting the noise option to "off" I found I had a much better picture. It is really only needed if the ISO is cranked up really high and then only in the "low" setting.

http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/43/e510-sett.html#LOCKRECOM is a great site for customising your settings for the Olympus E-510 or E-410. The web site also has a detailed review of the cameras which I found very helpful. There are other cameras in review there as well.

Once I lived with the suggested settings for awhile I then tweaked them a little to my liking, but pretty much found the suggestions to be spot on.

Camera Specific Tutorial for Dummies Found!

After having waited about 7 years to take the photography classes I'd dreamed of, I found I was sorely disappointed - at least in the beginning. I realize now I was just sorely lost. I had just bought my camera and had no idea how to operate it. I'd jumped into these classes with terms like apertures, white balance and metering and I had no idea how to find or set these features in my camera. There were only two of us with Olympus Cameras in the class and the other person was more lost than me. The instructor was a Nikon person and had boned up on Cannon but made it clear he couldn't hold the class back to figure out how my camera would set a custom white balance. He told me to read the manual then if I still didn't understand it he'd help me after class next time. I couldn't understand the manual. THAT was why I was in the class!

Being the impatient person I am, I didn't wait until next class to meet with my instructor. I started googling my camera on the Internet and low and behold there was LIGHT! On http://www.youtube.com/ there is video after video of people explaining every button, where it is, what it does and how to operate it. I found the Holy Grail! Just enter your camera make and model in the search bar. I spent hours there and have to say that by the time I went to class three, I was a master of my camera!

I did not go this route myself, but found out later that http://www.elitevideo.com/ sells really good instructional videos on just about any camera made. They are very detailed and go over every feature and button. Prices range from about $35 to $79 from what I could tell.

I had to understand how to operate my camera before I could move forward in understanding the technical side of photography. Once I did this, I was in the game.

Where Is A Digital Geek When You Need One?

It took me about two days to realize how over my head this new digital camera was. I'm pretty technically savvy for a Real Estate Agent / Mom / Grandma. This camera had more buttons on it than a 747! I had no idea how to operate it. The book was written in Geek and made no sense to me. I really wanted to know HOW to get the most out of this camera.

I looked for the University Catalog. The timing was right. I'd had my best year in Real Estate and my kids were grown. I signed up for a Fundamentals One class thinking that is all I would ever want or need to take. I mean all I really needed to know was what all those other buttons besides the green "A" on my camera would do, right? Yea... right!

Digital Deliema

I had tried a little Kodak digital camera when they first came out and hated it. It never worked right and the pictures were awful; but about 2006 I realized the digital camera quality was catching up to 35 mm. I knew that when the prices came down it would be much more cost effective to have a digital in the long run. I also liked the idea of being able to review your results imediately on the back of the camera.

In 2007 I started asking around and researching digital cameras. I was thinking seriously about a Cannon Rebel. One day my Broker told me of a lady that was trying to break into the photography business that would take really good pictures of my houses for nothing because she wanted the experience. I called her and used her as much as my conscience would let me without paying her - twice. She was really good. We stayed in touch and when I was just about to make the plunge I decided to call her first. She used an Olympus and liked it. It came from the box with two lenses - a wide angle and a telephoto. This would be perfect for me since I needed to take pictures wide angle for inside my houses and I loved doing nature photography as well. I looked up Olympus on the web and found nothing but positive posts. It had a stablizing feature in the body that many of the cameras didn't have. In March 2008 I bought my Olympus E-510. This picture of the blue bird on a bucket was one of the first pictures I took with my new camera. I was hand holding and this is zoomed up to about 7x. A little shake, but not bad.

The Hunger Begins

I saved my money and bought a Pentax ZX-7 35mm. Again, I never got past the "auto" mode - but loved it. Well, I did play around some with the macro feature without any outstanding results. But the landscapes were awesome. The camera really made me want to learn more about photography because I knew this camera was capable of so much more than what I could do with it on green "A".

About this same time, out of the blue, I started receiving a University Professional Studies Catalog in the mail every semester. I had never taken any of their classes, but loved looking through it. Every time it would come I would scan it from front to back and dog ear the pages with classes I'd like to take. The one that ALWAYS got turned down for sure was the page on photography classes. There was always an excuse. My job took a lot of my time, I was married and had kids so didn't want to be away nights, and finally money. It seemed like such an extravagant thing to do when we needed so many other things. I really did not see myself ever being able to take the classes, but I'd dog ear those pages just the same.

First REAL Camera

We were a nature loving family. Spent almost every weekend outdoors when I was growing up; backpacking, camping, and canoeing mostly. I really loved to take nature and landscape pictures. Taking pictures, however; was secondary to everything else I was doing. I never even considered spending a lot of money for a camera until I was in my mid thirties.

I was a Realtor and needed a decent camera to take photos of my listings. I knew nothing about cameras so my first purchase pretty much entailed walking into a camera shop and talking to the guy behind the counter explaining what I needed and how much I was willing to spend. He sold me a Minolta. It was one you could keep in "automatic" and it would make all the choices for you, or you could use it on manual and make your own. Of course I chose the former.

I took this picture of a sun set in California with it. I was very impressed with the results and took some really good pictures with that camera for quite awhile.

The pop up flash stopped working within about a year but I just worked around that by using 400 speed film whenever I photographed inside. Yea, this meant that I wasted a lot of film. For years my camera and I limped along like this. The rewind button finally did us in. It was this little rubber dot you had to press with the tip of a pen or something small like that. Eventually it stopped working for me. I took it to the camera shop and they told me it would cost more to fix it than the camera was worth. I'd had it about 8 years by then I think.